In this episode, we spoke with Dhruba Borthakur, Dhruba is the CTO and Co-founder at Rockset. Rockset is a search and analytics database hosted on the cloud.

Dhruba was the founding engineer of the RocksDB project at Facebook and the Principal Architect for HDFS for a while. In this episode, we discuss RocksDB and compare it with LevelDB. We also discuss in detail the Aggregator Leaf Tailer architecture, which started at Facebook and is now powering Rockset.

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In this episode, We spoke with Craig Dennis from Twilio about developer education and training. Craig's been working in the developer education space for a long time and has a ton of experience. And, of course, Twilio is a company well known for having a heavy investment in Developer relations and fantastic developer resources and learning resources. 

We get into a bunch of things around Twilio's developer education programs. Why Twilio, from a strategy standpoint, has invested so heavily in this and how teaching developers might actually be different than teaching regular people? We hope you enjoy the episode. 

If you've been involved with the Snowflake world, today's guest probably can skip an introduction as he is the demo king from the Snowflake Summit and well-known within the Snowflake builder community.

We're talking about Dash Desai, Developer Advocate at Snowflake. The background on this episode is that Sean's been part of the Snowflake Data Superhero Program and also involved in the community for a few years, and Sean has spoken at the last two Snowflake Summits. And after the past event in June, he got this idea that it might make for a fun podcast to go back through some of the announcements from the events and discuss what they might mean for those building with Snowflake, and maybe even get some of those building with Snowflake excited about it.

So even if you're not working with Snowflake, we keep things pretty high level during this interview. And we think there's probably something for everyone. Snowflake is clearly making this big push around supporting LLMs and generative AI workloads with things like Snowpark, containers, document AI and native support for NVIDIA NeMo and a bunch of other things that we get into today.

There's been a ton of announcements even since the Summit in this space with things that Snowflake is coming out with, and we'll cover some of that stuff down the road. Anyway, we hope you enjoy the show. 

Our special episode is here, and it's all about the latest news. Join Sean and Alex for an in-depth discussion.

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Startups can be a ton of fun. Also, it is sometimes very stressful and ultimately a very different experience than working at a company like Google, Meta Apple and so on.

Benjamin Popper is the Senior Director of Content at Stack Overflow and is our guest on the show today.

The background on today's episode is that both Ben and Sean have worked for startups as well as in Big Tech, and they have lots of friends and former colleagues who have struggled with navigating and thinking through the transition from big tech to startups, particularly for engineering roles.

In today's show, we walk through the choices faced while making such a transition. We focus on what are the options you have and how can you align these options with the ultimate goal of becoming the best software engineer you could be.

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Amazon's DynamoDB serves some of the highest workloads on the planet with predictable, single-digit millisecond latency regardless of data size or concurrent operations. Like many NoSQL databases, DynamoDB did not offer support for transactions at first but added support for ACID transactions in 2018. Akshat Vig and Somu Perianayagam are two Senior Principal Engineers on the DynamoDB team and are here to talk about the team's Usenix research paper describing how they implemented support for transactions while maintaining the core performance characteristics of DynamoDB.

In this show, we talk about DynamoDB transaction internals, performing user research to focus on core user needs, and staying on top of cutting-edge research as a Principal Engineer.

Over the past couple of months, Generative AI has taken the world by storm. OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT was a turning point. With each iteration, the Transformer has improved its capabilities while the underlying compute power needed to do the same task has seen massive efficiency gains. This trend has fueled a rise in the series of apps powered by Generative AI.

Hassan is a Senior Developer Advocate at Vercel, the company behind the famous Next.js framework. In this episode, we discuss interesting AI projects that Hassan has worked on. We talk about the future of generative AI, the impact it will have on developers, and Hassan shares his advice for newcomers in this space.

What would it look like if databases were built for developers rather than operators? Sam Lambert is the CEO of PlanetScale, a company that provides a managed MySQL database solution. PlanetScale uses Vitess, a database clustering system that allows for horizontal scaling of MySQL. MySQL powers an incredible amount of the internet, and Vitess is behind enormous MySQL installs at YouTube, Slack, GitHub, and more. 

In this show, we talk about the architecture of Vitess, what it's like to manage upgrades and releases of high-scale databases, and how to maintain a high-performance culture.

Welcome to the trailer episode for Software Huddle.

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